By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
One of the first acts of the French National Assembly in 1789 was to
issue this declaration: "The free communication of thought and
opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may
therefore speak, write and print freely." UNESCO still
defines "book" as "non-periodical printed publication of at least 49
pages excluding covers".
Yet, have the innovations of the last five years transformed the
concept of "book" irreversibly?
The now defunct BookTailor used to sell its book-customization
software mainly to travel agents. Subscribers assembled their own,
private edition tome from a library of electronic content. The
emerging idiosyncratic anthology was either printed and bound on
demand or packaged as an e-book.
Consider what this simple business model does to entrenched and age- old notions such as "original" and "copies", copyright, and book
identifiers. Is the "original" the final, user-customized book - or
its sources? Should such one-copy print runs be eligible to unique
identifiers (for instance, unique ISBN's)? Does the user possess any
rights in the final product, compiled by him? Do the copyrights of
the original authors still apply?
Members of the BookCrossing.com community register their books in a
central database, obtain a BCID (BookCrossing ID Number) and then
give the book to someone, or simply leave it lying around to be
found. The volume's successive owners provide BookCrossing with
their coordinates. This innocuous model subverts the legal concept
of ownership and transforms the book from a passive, inert object
into a catalyst of human interactions. In other words, it returns
the book to its origins: a dialog-provoking time capsule.
Their proponents protest that e-books are not merely an ephemeral
rendition of their print predecessors - they are a new medium, an
altogether different reading experience.
Consider these options: hyperlinks within the e-book to Web content
and reference tools; embedded instant shopping and ordering;
divergent, user-interactive, decision driven plotlines; interaction
with other e-books using Bluetooth or some other wireless standard;
collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities;
automatically or periodically updated content; multimedia
capabilities; databases of bookmarks, records of reading habits,
shopping habits, interaction with other readers, and plot-related
decisions; automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation
capabilities; full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking
capabilities; and more.
In an essay titled "The Processed Book", Joseph Esposito expounds on
five important capabilities of e-books: as portals or front ends to
other sources of information, as self-referencing texts, as
platforms being "fingered" by other resources, as input processed by
machines, and e-books serving as nodes in networks.
E-books, counter their opponents, have changed little beyond format
and medium. Audio books are more revolutionary than e-books because
they no longer use visual symbols. Consider the scrolling protocols - lateral and vertical. The papyrus, the broadsheet newspaper, and
the computer screen are three examples of the vertical kind. The e- book, the microfilm, the vellum, and the print book are instances of
the lateral scroll. Nothing new here.
E-books are a throwback to the days of the papyrus. The text is
placed on one side of a series of connected "leaves". Parchment, by
comparison, was multi-paged, easily browseable, and printed on both
sides of the leaf. It led to a revolution in publishing and,
ultimately, to the print book. All these advances are now being
reversed by the e-book, bemoan the antagonists.
The truth, as always, is somewhere in mid-ground between derision
and fawning.
The e-book retains one innovation of the parchment - the hypertext.
Early Jewish and Christian texts as well as Roman legal scholarship
were inscribed or, later, printed, with numerous inter-textual
links. The Talmud, for instance, comprises a main text (the Mishna)
surrounded by references to scholarly interpretations (exegesis).
Whether on papyrus, vellum, paper, or PDA - all books are portable.
The book is like a perpetuum mobile. It disseminates its content
virally, by being circulated, and is not diminished or altered in
the process. Though physically eroded, it can be copied faithfully.
It is permanent and, subject to faithful replication, immutable.
Admittedly, e-texts are device-dependent (e-book readers or computer
drives). They are format-specific. Changes in technology - both in
hardware and in software - render many e-books unreadable. And
portability is hampered by battery life, lighting conditions, or the
availability of appropriate infrastructure (e.g., of electricity).
The printing press technology shattered the content monopoly. In 50
years (1450-1500), the number of books in Europe swelled from a few
thousand to more than 9 million. And, as McLuhan noted, it shifted
the emphasis from the oral mode of content distribution
(i.e., "communication") to the visual mode.
E-books are only the latest application of age-old principles to
new "content-containers". Every such transmutation yields a surge in
content creation and dissemination. The incunabula - the first
printed books - made knowledge accessible (sometimes in the
vernacular) to scholars and laymen alike and liberated books from
the tyranny of monastic scriptoria and "libraries".
E-books are promising to do the same.
In the foreseeable future, "Book ATMs" placed in remote corners of
the Earth would be able to print on demand (POD) any book selected
from publishing backlists and front lists comprising millions of
titles. Vanity publishers and self-publishing allow authors to
overcome editorial barriers to entry and to bring out their work
affordably.
The Internet is the ideal e-book distribution channel. It threatens
the monopoly of the big publishing houses. Ironically, early
publishers rebelled against the knowledge monopoly of the Church.
The industry flourished in non-theocratic societies such as the
Netherlands and England - and languished where religion reigned (the
Islamic world, and Medieval Europe).
With e-books, content is once more a collaborative effort, as it has
been well into the Middle Ages. Knowledge, information, and
narratives were once generated through the interactions of authors
and audience (remember Socrates). Interactive e-books, multimedia,
discussion lists, and collective authorship efforts restore this
great tradition.
Authors are again the publishers and marketers of their work as they
have been well into the 19th century when many books debuted as
serialized pamphlets in daily papers or magazines or were sold by
subscription. Serialized e-books hark back to these intervallic
traditions. E-books may also help restore the balance between best- sellers and midlist authors and between fiction and non-fiction. E- books are best suited to cater to neglected niche markets.
E-books, cheaper than even paperbacks, are the
quintessential "literature for the millions". Both erstwhile reprint
libraries and current e-book publishers specialize in inexpensive
books in the public domain (i.e., whose copyright expired). John
Bell (competing with Dr. Johnson) put out "The Poets of Great
Britain" in 1777-83. Each of the 109 volumes cost six shillings
(compared to the usual guinea or more). The Railway Library of
novels (1,300 volumes) costs 1 shilling apiece only eight decades
later. The price proceeded to dive throughout the next century and a
half. E-books and POD resume this trend.
The plunge in book prices, the lowering of barriers to entry aided
by new technologies and plentiful credit, the proliferation of
publishers, and the cutthroat competition among booksellers was such
that price regulation (cartel) had to be introduced. Net publisher
prices, trade discounts, and list prices are all anti-competitive
practices of 19th century Europe. Still, this lamentable period also
gave rise to trade associations, publishers organizations, literary
agents, author contracts, royalties agreements, mass marketing, and
standardized copyrights.
The Internet is often perceived to be nothing more than a glorified - though digitized - mail order catalogue. But e-books are different.
Legislators and courts have yet to establish if e-books are books at
all. Existing contracts between authors and publishers may not cover
the electronic rendition of texts. E-books also offer serious price
competition to more traditional forms of publishing and are, thus,
likely to provoke a realignment of the entire industry.
Rights may have to be re-assigned, revenues re-distributed,
contractual relationships reconsidered. Hitherto, e-books amounted
to little more that re-formatted renditions of the print editions.
But authors are increasingly publishing their books primarily or
exclusively as e-books thus undermining both hardcovers and
paperbacks.
Luddite printers and publishers resisted - often violently - every
phase in the evolution of the trade: stereotyping, the iron press,
the application of steam power, mechanical typecasting and
typesetting, new methods of reproducing illustrations, cloth
bindings, machine-made paper, ready-bound books, paperbacks, book
clubs, and book tokens.
Without exception, they eventually relented and embraced the new
technologies to considerable commercial advantage. Similarly,
publishers were initially hesitant and reluctant to adopt the
Internet, POD, and e-publishing. It is not surprising that they came
around.
Printed books in the 17th and 18th centuries were derided by their
contemporaries as inferior to their laboriously hand-made
antecedents and to the incunabula. These complaints are reminiscent
of current criticisms of the new media (Internet, e-books): shoddy
workmanship, shabby appearance, and rampant piracy.
The first decades following the invention of the printing press,
were, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it "a restless, highly
competitive free for all ... (with) enormous vitality and variety
(often leading to) careless work". There were egregious acts of
piracy - for instance, the illicit copying of the Aldine
Latin "pocket books", or the all-pervasive book-bootlegging in
England in the 17th century, a direct outcome of over-regulation and
coercive copyright monopolies.
Shakespeare's work was repeatedly replicated by infringers of
emerging intellectual property rights. Later, the American colonies
became the world's centre of industrialized and systematic book
piracy. Confronted with abundant and cheap pirated foreign books,
local authors resorted to freelancing in magazines and lecture tours
in a vain effort to make ends meet.
Pirates and unlicensed - and, therefore, subversive - publishers
were prosecuted under a variety of monopoly and libel laws and,
later, under national security and obscenity laws. Both royal
and "democratic" governments acted ruthlessly to preserve their
control of publishing.
John Milton wrote his passionate plea against censorship,
Areopagitica, in response to the 1643 licensing ordinance passed by
the British Parliament. The revolutionary Copyright Act of 1709 in
England decreed that authors and publishers are entitled to
exclusively reap the commercial benefits of their endeavors, though
only for a prescribed period of time.
The never-abating battle between industrial-commercial publishers
with their ever more potent technological and legal arsenal and the
free-spirited arts and craftsmanship crowd now rages as fiercely as
ever in numerous discussion lists, fora, tomes, and conferences.
William Morris started the "private press" movement in England in
the 19th century to counter what he regarded as the callous
commercialization of book publishing. When the printing press was
invented, it was put to commercial use by private entrepreneurs
(traders) of the day. Established "publishers" (monasteries), with a
few exceptions (e.g., in Augsburg, Germany and in Subiaco, Italy)
shunned it as a major threat to culture and civilization. Their
attacks on printing read like the litanies against self-publishing
or corporate-controlled publishing today.
But, as readership expanded - women and the poor became increasingly
literate - the number of publishers multiplied. At the beginning of
the 19th century, innovative lithographic and offset processes
allowed publishers in the West to add illustrations (at first, black
and white and then in color), tables, detailed maps and anatomical
charts, and other graphics to their books.
Publishers and librarians scuffled over formats (book sizes) and
fonts (Gothic versus Roman) but consumer preferences prevailed. The
multimedia book was born. E-books will, probably, undergo a similar
transition from static digital renditions of a print edition - to
lively, colorful, interactive and commercially enabled objects.
The commercial lending library and, later, the free library were two
additional reactions to increasing demand. As early as the 18th
century, publishers and booksellers expressed the - groundless -
fear that libraries will cannibalize their trade. Yet, libraries
have actually enhanced book sales and have become a major market in
their own right. They are likely to do the same for e-books.
Publishing has always been a social pursuit, heavily dependent on
social developments, such as the spread of literacy and the
liberation of minorities (especially, of women). As every new format
matures, it is subjected to regulation from within and from without.
E-books and other digital content are no exception. Hence the
recurrent and current attempts at restrictive regulation and the
legal skirmishes that follow them.
At its inception, every new variant of content packaging was
deemed "dangerous". The Church, formerly the largest publisher of
bibles and other religious and "earthly" texts and the upholder and
protector of reading in the Dark Ages, castigated and censored the
printing of "heretical" books, especially the vernacular bibles of
the Reformation.
It even restored the Inquisition for the specific purpose of
controlling book publishing. In 1559, it issued the Index Librorum
Prohibitorum ("Index of Prohibited Books"). A few, mainly Dutch,
publishers ended up on the stake. European rulers issued
proclamations against "naughty printed books" of heresy and sedition.
The printing of books was subject to licensing by the Privy Council
in England. The very concept of copyright arose out of the forced
recording of titles in the register of the English Stationer's
Company, a royal instrument of influence and intrigue. Such
obligatory registration granted the publisher the right to
exclusively copy the registered book - or, more frequently, a class
of books - for a number of years, but politically constrained
printable content, often by force.
Freedom of the press and free speech are still distant dreams in
most parts of the earth. Even in the USA, the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA), the V-chip and other privacy-invading,
dissemination-inhibiting, and censorship-imposing measures
perpetuate a veteran though not so venerable tradition.
The more it changes, the more it stays the same. If the history of
the book teaches us anything it is that there are no limits to the
ingenuity with which publishers, authors, and booksellers, re-invent
old practices. Technological and marketing innovations are
invariably perceived as threats - only to be upheld later as
articles of faith. Publishing faces the same issues and challenges
it faced five hundred years ago and responds to them in much the
same way.
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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review,
PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International
(UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health
and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and
Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com